Friday 9 August 2013 11.30 EDT
First published on Friday 9 August 2013 11.30 EDT

Writing The Blind Assassin was a start-and-stop process. My first idea was to write about the generations of my grandmother and my mother, which together spanned the entire 20th century. They lived through the first world war and the second world war, both of which made a huge impact in Canada. Canada went into the first war in 1914 and the second one in 1939, two months before my birth, and the percentage of young Canadian men killed in those wars was very high.

The sense of loss is commemorated in towns across the country, almost all of which have prominent war memorials; which is why the erection of such a memorial is a central event in the novel. But neither my grandmother nor my mother was devious enough to take the lead in the novel I proposed to write, which involved quite a bit of lying. Neither of these women told lies; at difficult moments they changed the subject and talked about the weather. But my Iris Chase was predestined to be a liar, at least in matters that concerned her dead sister, Laura.

I first came at the story through a younger relative of Iris. Iris was dead, and this relative, who had inherited her house, had discovered a cache of letters in a hatbox; these letters revealed some of the secrets that Iris had been hiding. But the younger relative did not interest me and the hatbox did not convince, so out the window they went.

I tried again. This time Iris was still alive, and two young journalists who'd stumbled upon a clue were in pursuit of her.

There were several difficulties with this. First, Iris was way too canny to let these folks in the door, or to tell them anything she might have been concealing should they manage to worm their way in. Second, the two of them started having an affair, and since one – the man – was married and had twin babies, this affair became tangled, and threatened to take over the book. So the adulterous pair were exiled to a filing cabinet, where they are doubtless fornicating to this very day. There was a suitcase involved in this plot, and it contained a clue-containing photograph album. Suitcase and album followed the hatbox out the window, although one photograph stayed in the book in a changed form.

I withdrew to the starting line once more. This time I gave Iris full rein, and let her speak for herself in the first person. I don't know why that didn't occur to me in the first place. Perhaps I was afraid of her. She does become somewhat fearsome as the book moves along. The hatbox and the suitcase morphed into a much larger container – a steamer trunk, a piece of luggage everyone in that generation would have – and that steamer trunk remained in the story, and proved useful as a container of surprises. The original of the trunk was my mother's, and was fascinating to me as a child; it is now mine, although I have painted it to get rid of the rust.

The town of Port Ticonderoga is in itself a character in the book. It is a blend of Stratford, Ontario, which has a summer theatre festival; Saint Mary's, which has a quarry; Elora, which has a gorge; and Paris, Ontario, which is a port on a main river, and, like the others but more so, had some beautiful 19th-century architecture. Such towns once supported a wide array of mills and manufacturers, including button factories; thus the Chase family business. And many of these prospered in the early 20th century, but faltered and failed during the great depression, as does the Chase enterprise.

The depression years were also the "golden age" of science-fiction, fantasy and weird-tales pulp magazines, and the character Alex is modelled on the many writers who wrote for those pulps, often under multiple names. Then as now, SF is a form that allows an exploration of social structures in a more indirect and possibly more entertaining manner than does social realism.

The events of the depression lived through by the characters, including the men's march on Ottawa in 1935, the 1934 Communist rally in Maple Leaf Gardens, and the volunteers who went to the Spanish civil war, are all drawn from history. The news and magazine stories about them, however, were composed by me, except for the account of the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary, which is real; as is the fact that the posh passengers made off with everything moveable as souvenirs.

There is one other piece of literary imposture I should confess to. I'd chosen as one of the epigraphs a quotation from Elizabeth Smart, whose experimental 1945 novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was considered scandalous, and was suppressed by her Canadian relatives; but I could not get permission to use this quotation. So I substituted an inscription on a Phoenician burial urn, which I made up. Needs must when the Devil drives …